The first effort to prepare
Diego Garcia for people was in 1774 when the British
ship DRAKE dropped off pigs, sheep
and goats to propagate for future victualling ships
and maroons. The French dropped off the first
people, marooning lepers from Mauritius there in the
1780s because it was believed that they would eat
the abundant sea turtles, and this would cure their
leprosy, or at least delay the inevitable. The
British tried to establish a "victualling station"
of farms (using 6 ship loads of topsoil imported
from India) in 1786, but the attempt was a failure,
primarily because the East India Company ship ATLAS
wrecked on DG about a month later and the extra 250
mouths to feed doomed the effort. Then, a
Monsieur Lapotaire came out from the French colony
of Mauritius and set up the first plantation on
Eclipse Point in 1793. He brought the first
slaves with him. For those of you who don't
know, Eclipse Point is where the Officers' Club sits
today.

Eventually, the French set up four
plantations: Eclipse Point, Minni-Minni,
Pointe le est (East Point - the "plantation"
everyone goes to visit today) and Pointe
Marianne. There were also several other
small outlying "villages". In 1810, the
British captured Mauritius from the French during
the Napoleonic Wars, and with it Diego
Garcia. By 1838 the Eclipse Point plantation
closed, and in 1840 donkeys were imported because
British law (which freed the slaves in 1834)
forbade using humans to do work that could be done
by beasts of burden. The descendants of
those donkeys remain on the island to this day.

Even so, the islanders were
exploited. As Steve Forsberg notes in his
Masters' Thesis in History, an 1849 article in The
United Service Journal and Naval and Military
Magazine took a very dim view toward the progress
of the islands, whose proprietors “do not
themselves reside in these Islands, but live in
opulence where they like, deputing the management
of the affairs of the Chagos to a number of
registrars, or overseers.” There is
dismay that the laborers “resemble the tribes of
Africa, from whom they took their origin” and that
“No idea of a Supreme Being appears to exist in
the Chagos Archipelago.” After all, the
article points out, the proprietors are of “French
descent." The article states that pigs,
sheep, cows and chickens were everywhere, and that
a "valuable breed of pointers [dogs]" were
raised. It also noted that there sea
turtles, but that "seals and walrus were almost
entirely gone" from the island...

No doubt because of the whaling
ships that lurked in that part of the IO in the
mid 1800s, when the population of Diego Garcia was
in the 300-400s. In 1859 there were 338
souls (258 men, 39 women, and 41 children) and 350
donkeys. Anglican Bishop Vincent, who
visited that year, noted that many of the
inhabitants were Malabars (people from the SW
coast of India). In 1864, the Main House at the
East Point Plantation was constructed, and
plantation records showed 20 Europeans and 358
other inhabitants on the island.

Not that careful official records
were common - government officials from the
British colony of Mauritius visited
infrequently. For example, no official
visited between 1859 and 1875. Missionaries
were few and far between, and seemed to come out
to the island with the government officials - and
leave with them. The aforementioned Bishop
Vincent visited in 1859, stayed for a while, then
left the islanders to their own devices (Sega
Parties, I suppose) until a Roman Catholic Priest
visited in 1875. It wasn't until 1895 that a
church was built on Diego Garcia, but it was
crushed by a falling palm tree in the early 1930s,
and the current chapel at the East Point
Plantation was built to replace it in 1932.

In 1881, the British sent HMS
ECLIPSE to survey the island for use
as a coaling station for the steamboats operating
on the Suez-Australia run. The next year,
two companies set up shop. The Orient Steam
Navigation Company used "hulks" anchored off Minni
Minni Plantation to store their coal, although
they later moved their operation to Middle and
East Islands. W. Lund and Sons, LTD, used
hulks anchored at the East Point Plantation.
The "Coaling Station" period lasted until 1888,
and was marked by wild times, complete with
mutinies by the workers, bizarre witchcraft
rituals in graveyards, wildcat strikes, and even
an invasion by a drunk ship's captain. In
1884 Captain Raymond of the WINDSOR CASTLE
(carrying coal for Lund and Company) gets drunk,
lands at East Point with 16 armed men, takes pot
shots at an unoccupied building he thought was the
Manager's house, nailed a Union Jack on a nearby
palm tree, and claims the (already British) island
for Great Britain. He sobers up two days
later, and sails away. No one else in the
history of Diego Garcia ever got quite that drunk,
except one or two people, maybe once or twice.

In 1883, the three plantations on
Diego Garcia, as well as others on the tiny
islands of the NW Chagos, were bought out by the
Societe Huiliere de Diego et Perhos. The new
company closed the plantation at Minni Minni,
leaving only Point Marianne and East Point as
managerial centers. Remember, the people
lived in small communities around the island, so
there were still people living at Minni Minni, on
Middle and East Islands, and on Eclipse Point.

The first recorded "typhoon" hit in
1901. Although there have been some strong
storms since, one blowing away the US Air Force
Tent City at Point Marianne in 1990, but nothing
rating the name "hurricane". Actually, in
the IO, tropical storms are properly "cyclones".

In the 1700s & early 1800s most
Naval ships calling at Diego Garcia carried
scientists. For example, Captain Moresby of
the [British] Indian Navy visited in 1837, and
some of his observations were used by Darwin in
his books. True scientific expeditions
didn't call on Diego Garcia until 1886 when G. C.
Bourne spent four months studying the natural
history of the island. In 1899, the Germans
arrived and surveyed the marine fauna of the
lagoon. In 1905, the American's showed up
with their Percy Sladen Trust Expedition, and
established that Diego Garcia and the Chagos are
of volcanic origin. In 1967, the British
sponsored a complete hydrographic survey of the
lagoon, as well as carrying D.R. Stoddard and J.D.
Taylor who completed the first book-sized study of
the geology and ecology of the island. There
have been many others in the 2nd half of the 20th
Century, most notable the 1996 Charles Sheppard
expedition that resulted in the book "Ecology of
the Chagos Archipelago".

For all of its isolation, Diego
Garcia has played a role in every war of the 20th
& 21st centuries. One of the most
interesting parts of the history of the Plantation
was that it played host to the German Cruiser SMS
EMDEN, which arrived at the pier on
October 9, 1914. The EMDEN
had spent the preceding 30 days capturing or
destroying allied shipping in the Bay of Bengal
and the Maldives, and shelling the oil storage
tanks at the Indian port of Madras. She put
in to DG to scrape her bottom after a stunningly
successful, and chivalrous, voyage of commerce
raiding. At one point, the EMDEN's
Korvetten Kapitan (Karl Von Muller) released a
captured ship to continue on its way, simply
because there were women passengers on
board. Well, he ran off to DG to take a
break, do some repairs, and refuel from his
collier. The Plantation Manager there, who
did not know WWI had started, helped him get fixed
up, reprovisioned, and on his way, and Kapitan Von
Muller paid handsomely for the services, using
cash captured from British ships! After
leaving Diego, the EMDEN had an
equally successful second cruise, until she met
her fate off Cocos Island, where the HMAS
SYDNEY caught her and shot her to
pieces on the reef (the SYDNEY
stood off with her six-inch guns and the EMDEN
couldn't return fire with her 4.1s).
What's really cool is that the shore party of 50
men, led by the Executive Officer Kapitan-Leutnant
Helmuth von Mucke, which was busily destroying the
Cable and Wireless station on the atoll when the SYDNEY
arrived, stole a yacht, the AYESHA
and sailed to neutral Java, talked their way out
of internment by the Dutch, snuck off in a tramp
steamer to Arabia, and then hiked to Istanbul,
which was the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which
was allied with Germany - the longest Escape and
Evasion in history (it took them seven months, and
many died on the way - most killed by Arabs who
were revolting against the Turks).

In WWII, the Brits built the gun
positions at Cannon Point in 1942, billeting the
crews at Camp Marcel and Point Marianne, and
established a forward sea-plane base at East
Point. British and Canadian sea-planes were
based there. The UK's military left in 1946,
and didn't return until the Amercans arrived in
1971 (the history since then is detailed elsewhere
in this website).

Throughout all this, the East Point
Plantation was the center of the island
population, until it was closed in 1971.
Here's a map of the island in 1971. Most of
the names are in French, since that language had
been spoken by the workers since they first came
ashore as slaves 178 years earlier.

GETTING
THERE

In the late 1980s,
getting to the Plantation was practically
impossible. First you had to get to Diego
Garcia - and only if you were assigned there by
the US or UK militaries, did you have a
chance. For the swabbies and other
Americans living in downtown DG, it meant
getting one of a limited number of permits from
the Brits, then finding somebody with a truck to
take you down there (it was possible to bicycle
down - it was only a 45 mile round trip from
downtown). For the Filipino and Mauritian
workers, it was even harder to work the deal,
and I'll bet there were hundreds of them who
worked on DGAR for years and NEVER got to go to
the Plantation. LOTS of interesting deals
were made in exchange for a trip to the one
place on the island that had any mystique about
it.

One way was to be a
good boy or girl and get awarded "On-Island R
& R". This was a 3-day pass awarded to
"top performers" and others in the good graces
of the honchos. The SEABEES had
refurbished the old Met Office just north of the
Plantation, and turned it into a bunk
house. If you got one of these passes, you
were given a box of food and a ride over to the
place and dropped off for a couple nights.
It was supposed to be a reward, where one was
unbothered by the day to day bullshit of the
military base, but most of the people I talked
to didn't care much for it - no TV, no radio, no
booze, no friends. Here's a picture of the
R&R Center undergoing renovation in
1982. The guy without the shovel
must be the LPO...

Below: Here's
a photo of the building (which was originally the
Meteorological Station) in 1972, courtesy of Larry
Duran.
Note the baskets in the lower right corner of the
photo, left behind by the plantation workers when
they were evacuated in 1971.

Below:
All there really was to do at the R&R Center
was to try and get Missy drunk.

I first visited the Plantation during a
stopover in 1981. Our C-141 had broken
down so we had some time on our hands, and our
loadmaster had a brother in the SEABEES
deployed there at the time. So we
hitched a ride over to the plantation in a
construction van. First we had to change
a tire at the SEABEE work yard, and get some
food from the "Silver Fox" there in
Splinterville.

When I was
deployed there myself in 1982, I met an
Australian Naval Officer, Steve Swayne, who as a
member of the British Commonwealth and therefore
didn't need to get a special pass to visit the
Plantation, and we went over there 2 or 3 times,
and strolled the Main Street with
impunity. Of course, it rained. And
rained. And rained.

Above -
the "Main Drag" at the East Point Plantation
in 1982.Below -
Larry Duran's photo of the "Main Drag" taken
in 1972 from approximately the same location
as the one above.
The jungle takes over quickly in the
tropics.
Note the little palm tree on the lower left
and how large it is 10 years later in the
photo above.

THE
EAST POINT PLANTATION'S BUILDINGS

By 1982, the
Plantation had been abandoned about 10
years, and was in real bad shape.
When I was stationed on DG in 1987-88, the
deterioration was severe, and the US Navy
Chief's Association wanted to do a civic
service project to restore some of the old
buildings. However, the British
Administrator for the BIOT came through on
his annual visit, and told the USN not to
permit it. His reasoning was that
then Mauritians employed as contractors on
the island would take photos of the
restored buildings, and send them to
relatives in Mauritius, where the
newspapers would then print them, and
create more hard feelings by the displaced
Ilois Islanders. Well, now there's
the internet, and no Plenipotentiary
Minister is able to stop the free flow of
info and photos because it might be
embarrassing to one government or the
other! Its also apparent that his
decision was reversed sometime in the near
distant past, as these "before and after"
photos show.

The
"Master's House" at East Point
Plantation, 1945:

Below - Larry
Duran's photo of the Manager's House
taken from the beach in 1972.
The civilian population on DG had been
relocated about 6 months previously.Below:
The Manager's house in 1987Below: The
Manager's house in 2002 (photo by
Bob Ralph), following
a spruce-up by the NSF Chief's
Association.

Below: The huts the workers
lived in. Photo from 1972 by
Larry Duran.

Below:
The Chapel at East Point Plantation,
1946. Nobody kept
it up in those days - organized
Christianity never was a big part of
Diego Garcia's Plantation era, unless
there was a missionary on the island -
Father Dussercle, a Catholic Priest, was
there from 1933 into WWII, but gave up
and moved away because the British
troops didn't cooperate with his
theocratic rule, and the Chapel went to
ruin.

Below:
The Chapel at East Point
Plantation, 1972.Larry Duran
took these photos of the Chapel
in 1972, just a few months after the
plantation was evacuated:

Below:
The Chapel at East Point Plantation,
1982It had been fixed
up prior to the closure of the
Plantation in 1972. When I took
this picture, there was still a
confession box and holy water basins
inside, but the roof was a sieve and
everything was moldy and rotten from the
100 inches of rain that fell annually.

Below:
The Chapel at East Point
Plantation, 2002

Miscellaneous
Buildings at the East Point Plantation:

Above - This everyone thought was the "jail"
but it was actually the blacksmith shop. Photo
from 1982.
Below - Larry Duran's photos of the infirmary.
Medical care during the Plantation Period was pretty
basic...Here's Larry's picture of the
only motorized vehicle they left behind!Below is the home of the
plantation "tally-man", Michel Vincatassin
(Grandfather of Allen Vincatassin, who was born in
this house)
with the Chapel behind it (photo by Larry Duran,
1972):Below: The
Pier at the East Point Plantation

It's hard to
believe that cruisers and seaplanes used to tie up
here, but they did. The small "railroad" you
see was for the coconut carts hauled by the little
donkeys. According to some, these little
railroads ran all over the island, clear up until
1971. This photo is from 1982. It's only
deteriorated more.

Below: The Grave Yard at East
Point Plantation

There
are two cemeteries on the island that I know
of. One is on the airfield at Point
Marianne, and one at the East Point Plantation (it
is the big one). There may also be one at
Minni Minni, however as that site was abandoned in
the late 1880s, it may not be noticeable these
days. When I was there in 1982, the Brits
told me that in the 1970s some SEABEES broke into
some of the graves at both Point Marianne and East
Point, and because of that, the Brits had made the
East Point Plantation "off limits" and to visit,
one needed to obtain a permit from the Brit
Rep. Every time I ever went to the
Plantation, or to Point Marianne for that matter,
everyone in my party was very respectful of the
graves.

The
displaced Ilois Islanders have a deep regard for
the graves of their ancestors, and have petitioned
from time to time to return to visit the grave
sites. In 2006 they were finally allowed to
do so, and brought with them a Catholic
Priest. No offense to the Ilois or the Pope,
but from everything I've read about the history of
the island, and despite the crosses on many
graves, Christianity played little role in their
lives and the religion practiced involved
witchcraft and what in Haiti would be termed
voodoo. But one man's cult is the next man's
religion, and visiting the graves of their
ancestors appears to be very important to the
Ilois, and they should be aware that the Brits and
USN have taken great pains to make sure the
graveyards have remained unmolested for at least
25 years. Here's a photo of it in 1982:

This is an
old interview, but still germane:

Believe it
or not, there is actually a scholar who has
completed a history of DG,
and he was stationed out there too! A
fellow traveler! Many
thanks to Steve Forsberg for sending me this
information:

I've found some material (surprisingly) on life in
the plantation days. I've had retrieved from
the bowels of the PRO (Public Records Office) in
England copies of reports from administrators and
representatives from several hundred years back up
until WWII. There are some interesting
tidbits in those:

In a handwritten message from Auditor General E.C.
Ashley, it is noted that in 1886 there were
363,094 liters of coconut oil exported to
Mauritius. In an 1886 report the Police
Officer on Diego Garcia estimated that it cost
about Rs 10,000 to maintain his station
(apparently, they often used Indian Rupees as the
currency in reports), and then went into options
as how to pay for it. A flat tax of Rs1 a
ton on imported coal would "probably stop all
industry", but a figure 1/4th of that (along with
a subsidy) would do nicely. Apparently,
approximately 3,000 to 6,000 tons of coal a year
were imported to the island. The British,
however, concerned that such paying such a huge
sum would wreck their empire ;-), were looking
into getting rid of the police officer.

A 1913 report by a visiting inspector discussed
the "prison" on Pointe Marianne. "There are
three cells in good condition. The Book
contains one entry, Noel Bonguot--Disturbance--One
day. The prison diet consists of rice and
salt, and the prisoners are given also black or
red lentils or salt-fish and sometimes
both............As regards the physical exercise
granted to the prisoners, I have issued
instructions to the Managers to grant at least one
full hour to each prisoner to go out and walk
about. A fact which must be taken into
consideration is that the maximum term of
imprisonment which a Manager is empowered to
inflict is 6 days. So, supposing a prisoner
were deprived entirely of physical exercise during
6 days, he would not suffer to an alarming
extent."

Some other data from 1913: There were
18 births, 13 deaths, and 3 marriages.
Causes of death were "worms", heart disease, and
tabes mesenterica (carreau). There were 144
donkeys, 1 mule, and 2 horses on the island. There
were 7 boats (pirogues) and 2 pinnaces.
Exports from Sept 1913 to March 1914 were:
16,109 veltes of oil 2,925 bags of
coprah 2,186,285 cocoa-nuts.

Question:
How much was a velte? How heavy was a bag of
coprah? Any idea what the population was at
any given time?

I don't recall offhand exactly how much a 'velte'
was, but it was something like 10 bottles of a
certain size. At Pointe Marianne, in 1913,
there were 135 men, 92 women, 67 boys, and 36
girls. Sometimes the statistics are a
bit hazy, because often they are broken up
differently. For example, sometimes Peros
Banhos is included in stats for what were known as
the "Lesser Dependencies", or "Oil Islands".
Peros Bahnhos is about 120 miles from DG, and its
main settlement was Ile du Coin. At
various times, there were also small populations
occupying the 'Six Islands' and the "Three
Brothers".

In 1940 Magistrate M. Rousette wrote "It was
a moving sight to see two centenarians coming
every afternoon to rest in the hospital bed when
they are given tea; one of them suffering from
"cataract"; in spite of all persuasive argument
and solicitations the old man refused obstinately
to come to Mauritius when I tried to convince him
that he could successfully be operated on.
He refused, saying that he preferred to die on his
island and be buried together with his
wife" (so much for the "no
natives" line the Brits later took).

Another report from this time frame covered the
early boozing days "Bacca: Legislation
should be passed to prevent the preperation or
drinking of 'bacca' a fermentation of vegetables
and sugar which is not only highly deleterious of
health but promotes great excitement with the
result that disturbances and affrays commonly
occur."

During World War II some of the Brits on the
island were secret GCHQ types (radio intel,
predecessors to modern cryptologists). They
apparently made at least one significant
discovery, they found that the Portugese embassy
in India was secretly retransmitting messages from
the Japanese, forwarding them to the Germans in
Europe.

For most of the Islands "recent" (150 years)
history there have been two settlements, one being
Pointe de l'Est and the other Pointe
Marianne. I don't think that the current
"downtown" area was permanently inhabited until
the early 1970s when the base construction began.

Question:
Do you recall the incident with the German Cruiser
EMDEN (Oct 1914)? Brian Mendham, who was the
Cable & Wireless Station Manager there in 1988
told me the story of her sailing to East Point,
and getting refurbished just before sailing for
Cocos, where she was blown to bits.

This is basically what
happened. IIRC the Emden was damaged during
an engagement near Madagascar but escaped in a
rainstorm. When she pulled into Diego Garcia
the captain claimed the ship had suffered "storm
damage". The Island managers were very
suspicious, but helped the Germans restock and
soon the Emden was off. A few days later a
couple of British cruisers pulled into the islands
and the inhabitants were informed that the 'Great
War' was ongoing. The Emden was destroyed
later at Cocos, the first warship ever sunk by the
then newly established Australian navy. It
was not until after WWI that the island got its
first radio set. Several books have been
written about the "Emden" and her crews exploits.

Question:
Have you run across any explanation as to why they
expelled the Illios? I almost understand
from DG, but why from the whole archepelgo?
Was it just the economics of keeping up a civil
administration? As I say somewhere on the
web site, I'd not be very happy if they tried to
run me back to Glasgow or Reuen or Cadiz.

The reasoning was fairly straightforward -- the
islands were wanted for military purposes, and the
US in particular did not want to have to deal with
any "natives". The late 60s and early 70s
were times of some tumult. The British were
making their famous withdrawal from "East of the
Suez" and the US was afraid that the Soviets would
move into the area with the assistance of regional
third-world nations. The original treaty did
not specify which island/islands the US would use
"for defensive purposes", and the US wanted them
all cleaned off 'just in case'. Originally,
the US wanted to use not Diego Garcia but another
nearby island (Adabaran?? or something like
that). At any rate, the US was getting
kicked out of Vietnam, our very large intelligence
station at Asmara, Ethiopia, was about to be
abandoned (due to civil war), it seemed the
Indians and Somalis were getting ready to host the
Soviets, etc. etc. The US wanted a facility
in the region, and did not want any hassle with
"local natives". So for a pile of money the
British kicked the Ilois off for us.

I've thought of the Ilois as the "american
indians" of the Indian Ocean. They basically
did not own land or settle 'permanently'.
They moved freely over the islands of the central
and western Indian Ocean --- Mauritius,
Seychelles, Chagos, Maldives,
Ceylon..... They might be born on one
island, be raised on another, go from island to
island working, get married on another..... and so
on. Everywhere they went they
were an ethnic minority, with the exception of the
various Chagos Islands which served as a sort of
'homeland'. It probably never even occurred
to them to try and stake out any 'legal' claim of
ownership. Unfortunately for them, as
'westernized' nations took over various islands
all sorts of legal and economic factors started
interfering with their free movement. If
they now had to sign an 'employment agreement' to
get from Island to Island, so be it.

As for "amply compensated" [following there
removal], well..... To make a
long story short, the island of Mauritius thought
that when it got its independance from the UK its
territory would include the Chagos Islands.
At the last moment, the Brits formed the BIOT and
told the Mauritians that they had to drop their
claim. Well, the Mauritian leaders basically
agreed as long as any compensation for the
dislocated Ilois was paid to the Mauritian
government, and not directly to the Ilois.
The Mauritian government would see to it that the
money was "fairly distributed". Most of the
money apparently dissappeared. Most of the
Ilois ended up living in the worst ghettos in
Mauritius (though I've never visited, I'm told
that the *best* ghettos in Mauritius are pretty
darned bad).

The statistics and data I've given are mostly from
a stack of official British reports from the
Public Records Office of the UK (newly located in
Kew). The paper is footnoted, but it is hard
to find good data on the island. Most of the
time you just find a short mention here or a
one-liner there. I've got a couple of books
that were printed in India, but they mainly deal
with political/diplomatic aspects of Indian Ocean
issues not much with history.

regards,Steve Forsberg,Wizard 87-01

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